Morning journal and courier., 1887-06-28
WOMEN WHO OWN RANCHES.
They Are Not All Angels, Though All
are P1ucky and Some are Very veal

They Are Not All Angels, Though All
are Plucky and Some are Very Veal
thy.
from an Interview with Theodore Roosevelt.I
ssThere are women all over the West who
have come to be as thoroughly capable of
managing their affairs for themselves as if
they were the shrewdest OF men. Fortitude
and patience we always look for in woman,
but cool bravery and business talent are the
qualities that sometimes come out strongest
when she finds herself facing rude ciyiliza-
ton and left to shift for herself as best she
can.
''Life on the ranch is desperately rough
for woman. There is no call to pity pio-
neer of the other sex, for if he has the right
stuff in him 1t won't hurt him to buckle
right down to the bone, and then he can't
bat succeed. But for woman, to east
ern at least, it seems different. And yet so
far as one can see they like it, good many
of them, and it brings out the best that is in
them.
"They are not all angels by any means,
and woman desperate is sometimes quite
as much to be feared as the worst of the
men. There was one down in Arizona whom
the ranchmen tell tales of yet, and with
something like pride in her exploits too, who
killed, so they say, twenty. five men with her
own hand. She was hard rider and crack
shot, so that it was decidedly risky to be
covered by her rife. But that same pluck
and courage that she showed turned into
more peaceful channels makes a splendid
success of some of the ranchwomen.
'fThe women who are managing cattle
ranges for themselves, not helping their hus-
bands gain footing. which is sometimes
- fr0p oil GOpiQI n kg
and have drifted into the business don't
know what proportion of them have delibe-
rately chosen it-in all sorts of ways Some
of them Texans who were almost Graded
with cattle, and to whom running mower,
feeding stock, breaking wild horses Or doing
any sort of work about ranch is SO much a
matter of education and habit that it seems
as much their natural occupation as taking
in sewing to a notable housewife left q wild
ow in an eastern village. They take hold
cleverly with their husbands if they marry; !;
they strike out for themselves on small
scale, which sometimes grows TO q larger one
if they don't.
"Other ranch women. especially in Dako-
ia. come from New England, New York or
the States north of the Ohio. There are
school-teachers among them who have cons
clnded to train something that may possibly
shoot more proftably than the unfruitful
young idea. Most of them went West in the
first place with their husbands to see what
could be done in a new country, and when
the man of the family died or broke down
the wife, rather than sacrifice the foothold
already gained, stayed on, learned by expe-
rience, bought her knowledge pretty dearly
sometimes, failed utterly perhaps, if the
winters were bad or fire swept her build
ings, succeeded more probably, kept her
stock in good shape, added to their numbers
and came out ahead little every year.
stSuccess is graded of course as elsewhere.
The women ranchers whom I know personal
ly-and that is no very large number-are
not in the business on very large scale.
Some of them are not ranching as eastern
people, with their ideas of the bigness of
western operations, interpret the word at all.
They have no more than six or ten cattle
perhaps, and from that the number will run
up to twenty-five or fifty head, but they are
an energetic and business-like set of women,
who are working industriously in the day of
though perhaps with no large number of
others, the day of larger things has already
come"
How the ranch woman, whose business en-
terprise Mr.. Roosevelt commends in the
West, sometimes makes her start from the
East, is illustrated in the case of New
York boarding-house keeper who is working
at both ends of the line just now. Keeping
boarders is one of the most wearisome and
discouraging ways in which a woman earns
living. But when she can keep one hundred
and fifty of them the case is different in
deed. This energetic woman had laid by
money enough some three or four years ago
to take up land in Dakota and stock, on
small scale, a cattle range. Since that time
her cattle have thrived and her boarding has
prospered. With the profits of the latter
she has increased the number and improved
the breed of the former, and is looking for
ward to the day, not very far distant, when
her western venture shall be SO well started
and under such promising headway that she
need heed no longer the complaints OF the
parior floor lodger whose egg is always
minute too hard or ten seconds too soft, but
can put up her Gotham shutters and settle
herself to grow up with the country in the
free and bounding West, where her hand
need practice its cunning in the mixing of
hash no more.
The women of the cities and towns East
and West have sometimes curious notion OF
what they are going to see when they make
their first acquaintance with a cattle range.
There was one little lady who went from New
York last year who alighted with her piano
in front of her husbands sod dugout. and
was not a little surprised to find that if the
doorway was enlarged to let the musical in
strument in, the family, for want of the
room it occupied, would have to sleep out
side. She took the only course possible un-
| der the circumstances, moved for the instant
erection of a frame house, and was comfort